Making fonts

Consider this page, and pages and information linked to from here, as outdated. They are not maintained any more. They merely serve as an archive which gives a glimpse at a past passion of mine.

Papers

Papers are provided ‘as is’ and there is no warranty that information offered therein is correct. Papers are about 15 years old now and may be considered outdated. Yet they have served foundries, small and big, well and may still offer some insights, if only to add a historical perspective. Links got updated where possible. No questions. No answers. It is on you to test your fonts thoroughly.
 Font Naming
About naming font families. Presents two common naming schemes, others may be interpolated from these. Variable fonts are not covered. With screenshots of FontLab Studio 5’s Font Info dialog.
v1.04 (v1.0: 12 Feb 2006) / 152KB
 Font Metrics
About assigning vertical font metrics. How to avoid clipping or squashing of large glyphs. With screenshots of FontLab Studio 5’s Font Info dialog.
v1.10 (v1.0: 9 Dec 2005) / 112KB
To my delight, both papers became obsolete once Fontographer 5 and FontLab VI (and 7 and 8) featured automatisms for naming fonts and for calculating vertical metrics. For your amusement, an old proposal:
 Font Naming Interface
v1.01 (v1.0: 13 Nov 2005) / 188KB
Another suggestion, originally conceived with Studio 5 in mind and posted among the notes, got implemented in Glyphs immediately, being one of its stand-out features, was offered as an extension for RoboFont, and eventually got implemented in FontLab VI (and 7 and 8) too. The idea is that attachment points are represented not by mere dots but by attached glyphs themselves, providing actual visual feedback:
 FLS Anchor Feature Request
v0.5 (v0.1: 14 Jul 2008) / 444KB
Finally, for your amusement, here is an early version of my former link collection related to making OpenType fonts, of about 15 years ago:
 OpenType Resources
v1.006 (19 Dec 2005) / 151KB

Scripts

Make Kern Feature, Glyph Tweaker, Transformer, and other scripts for FontLab Studio 5 and RoboFont 1 and 3 are enjoying their well-deserved retirement. An updated Make Kern Feature script may be available on request.

P.S.

FontLab, to this day, is my font editor of choice. See YouTube for some nice tutorials. Some RoboFont too.


All texts & images, unless noted otherwise:
© Karsten Lücke
All rights reserved.
All product and company names mentioned may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
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